


The Dumb Genius's Stupid Spaceship

by josephina_x



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Adventures in Outer Space, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future, Ford is Not Stupid, Gen, IN SPACE!, Stan is Not Stupid, The Adventures of Ford and Stan, Uh Oh Here Comes Bill Cipher…
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-13 20:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21004037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: Dipper couldn’t get the stupid magnet gun to work, and now... he’s never coming back.It’s all his fault. (All of it.) Great-Uncle Fordnevershould have trusted him. (Trust no one.) And now Great-Uncle Ford wasgone foreverandnever coming back. (He’d screwed up, and now they were all paying the price.) He shouldn’t have done it. (Great-Uncle Ford was paying for his mistakes now, in some unknown alienjailsomewhere out in outer space, and--) He should have triedharder, he should have beenbetter; he should have tried--It’s all his fault. He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. He’d screwed upso badly, and now--





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (Alternate Title: Stan and Ford vs. The Future)

\---

Stan was at a loss.

He'd managed to find Dipper, with Mabel's help and that old walkie-talkie set that the kids had been using, even with that signal going in and out again, all half-static most of the time. But…

\---

When Dipper and his _genius_ brother hadn't shown their faces by the time he'd finished making dinner, and Stan went upstairs to go wake up his grand-niece, tear-streaked face and all…

Well, Mabel wasn't the only one panicking a little bit, when they realized that neither of them had heard from or caught sight of either of their twin siblings for several hours now. And it was starting to get pretty dark outside.

Stan hadn't gone out into those woods in the dark of night for a really long time, but it wasn't like he didn't know how to prepare for actually doing it by this point. So while Mabel was grabbing up her own backpack, raring to go -- Stan demanded she go setting it right down again in the kitchen, because she needed to eat and drink something before she went out with him to get them. The last thing any of them needed was Mabel running out of energy partway through a ‘rescue mission’ -- which she’d do without some food in her (and some Mabel Juice apparently, which Stan let her go off and make another pitcher of for herself after wolfing down her own meal… probably enough of it for there to be some left over for their respective brothers too, if those thermoses she’d pulled out of the cabinet weren’t just for show). And while she was all kept busy doing that... Stan had left the kitchen and gotten up to his _own_ preparations, so to speak.

\---

It felt a little weird, Stan had to admit, seeing the look Mabel got on her face when he came back into the kitchen, and she saw him all decked out for tromping around in the woods himself.

"...Grunkle Stan?" she said, blinking up at him all wide-eyed, as he dropped his duffel bag down on the kitchen floor to go rummaging through the fridge for a couple of sodas and extra bottles of water, before moving on to the cabinets for the jar of peanut butter and the last of the half a loaf of bread.

"What?" Stan complained at her, half-over his shoulder, without stopping or slowing down at all what he was doing, shoving food into his bag. "I helped you two figure out your adventuring backpacks and junk, didn't I?" he said, as he dropped down a bit to finish stuffing the last few supplies in, along with a couple of cans of brown meat -- just in case -- before zipping it back up and shouldering it diagonally across his back. "I've been out in those woods before."

"You have?" Mabel said, then paused for a moment. "Haha, I mean, of course you have, silly me," she said next, waving a sweater-covered hand at him, and looking a little embarrassed. "You helped get Dipper and Grunkle Ford back from that brain-eating guy and everything. --And you went into the woods with us to rescue Waddles from that nasty old raptor, too!"

"Yeah, sure," Stan said after almost no pause, as he helped Mabel get her own backpack on and checked the straps for her. "I was talkin' more about the tours in the golf cart,” Except, not really, he hadn't. “But yeah. Guess that all counts too." He kept forgetting that the kids were convinced he was three kinds of stupid, and that they liked him better that way. Dipper had gotten mad that he'd known about magic and lied about it, and Mabel had looked shocked and… well, he knew Mabel would probably back him up, but he'd seen what had happened between Dipper and Mabel already, after Mabel had trusted him even though Dipper had told her not to. Kid had been freaked the hell out over everything -- not that Stan blamed him.

That did remind him though, as he stood up from his kneeling posture -- it'd probably be a good idea for him to grab that baseball bat from behind the couch to bring with him, too. ...Hell, maybe even the crowbar from the trunk of the Stanleymobile too, for good measure. Y'know, just in case he needed to go breakin' into anything, and the first crowbar (already in his duffel bag) broke on his first. Not like he hadn't had _that_ happen to him before, once or maybe twice. Definitely not three times, though. Nope. He’d always managed to keep it below three.

\---

He hadn’t managed to keep it below three times this time. This time was definitely the third time, prying that big circular metal mechanical-iris thing partially open, so they could toss that rope down to Dipper to tie around himself, so they could pull him outta there, up through the dumb ‘ceiling’ of the place, that crazy room inside that stupid spaceship.

\---

Everything was just a little bit crazy. It was super-dark out, but instead of being home at the Shack in bed, Mabel was walking around out in the woods with Grunkle Stan, of all grunkles.

And Grunkle Stan? He didn’t really look like the old Grunkle Stan that she knew and loved; not really. He actually looked a little more like… like…

\--Well, _sort of_ himself, but he was also dressed up in something other than a suit and tie or his grunkly old-man clothes for once! And it _wasn't_ something that was still some kinda weird pants and Hawaiian-looking shirt combo, either. He actually looked kind of… ready for adventuring like _Dipper_ did, when he got all serious about _preparing_ for things. Grunkle Stan wasn’t wearing a vest, but he _was_ wearing some pretty thick-looking red coat with some pretty big pockets in it (and some kind of fur around the collar of it?) -- and, okay, still just some kind of boring old-man white shirt underneath it, but he was _also_ wearing a pair of big stomp-around-in-the-woods boots on his feet, not his normal dressy shoes that Mabel had thought he always wore because he just didn't _have_ anything else to wear, except he did -- and he was even wearing some actual _blue jeans_ too, which Mabel would have _never_ been able to picture him in until she’d seen him actually _wearing_ them, and...

The whole thing, seeing Grunkle Stan all serious like this, made her feel like the whole zombie apocalypse thing with Dipper all over again, and that time she’d been falling with him with the thing with Gideon and the explosives in the statue head, and even the whole almost getting eaten by dinosaurs thing, too -- you know, kinda nervous, but also kinda safe at the same time, but also _really_ kinda nervous too? Because Grunkle Stan was _there_ and _on their side_ and looking out for them, but things were still being completely crazy and just not over yet, and...

Grunkle Stan had a flashlight in his pocket, which he'd used on the Stanleymobile getting something out of the trunk before they'd left, but he wasn't using it. He was holding a lantern up now as they walked through the forest -- the same old lantern that Dipper had found in one of those many junk-looking closets in the Shack a while ago -- and… Grunkle Stan was actually _using_ it. And it actually worked better to light up the woods around them than his and her own flashlight had been _combined_...

...so after awhile, Mabel had given up on trying to help light the way herself and just decided to focus on trying to raise Dipper on his walkie-talkie with her own.

"Dipper. Dip-Dop, come in, over." A pause, with nothing but static. "Dipper. Bro-bro. Dipper.” Nothing but static. “...Dipper, can you _hear_ me, over?" Static, static, and more static. "Dipper, _please_\--"

Mabel felt a hand come down on her shoulder, and she realized she'd stopped walking. She realized she was shaking slightly. She realized--

"Grunkle Stan," she began shakily, turning around and looking up at his face. Because she’d been asleep for _hours_, and Dipper hadn’t called, he wasn’t answering, she would have woken up and heard if he’d called; she should’ve realized something was wrong _sooner_. She should’ve _known_ that-- "Dipper--"

"--Your brother's just fine," her Grunkle Stan told her. "My brother's the dumbest genius I've ever met, sure, but," and Grunkle Stan knelt down, to set down the lantern at his side, and he wiped away a tear from her cheek with a gentle hand as she sniffled, and he gave her a soft smile as he said, "He'd never let anything bad happen to your brother."

And at that, Mabel’s heart just couldn’t _take_ it -- so she went in for a hard-and-fast hug, because she _really_ needed one. (...But maybe Grunkle Stan really needed one, too?)

"Hey, hey," her favorite grunkle told her, returning the hug and rubbing her back a bit. "Sweetie, I promise you, Dipper's gonna be just fine, you'll see," he told her, as she slowly let go of him, and he straightened up a bit again. "C'mon," he said, as he picked up his lantern again, and adjusted the baseball bat behind his back where it was held in place by the duffel bag, before he held out his free hand. "Let's go find our two stupid brothers. Yeah?"

Mabel smiled a watery smile and let out a laugh at that, because how could she not?

"Yeah," Mabel agreed, taking Grunkle Stan's hand. "Let go find our two stupid brothers, the big dummies." She let out a huff. "Worrying us and missing dinner and everything."

"If they get all the way back to the Shack and see the note on the TV before trying to raise you on that walkie-talkie of yours, they're both gonna be in a boatload of trouble," Grunkle Stan said next to her all grunkly.

Mabel's smile got a little complicated at that. But she was feeling overall a little less wobbly when she tried the walkie-talkie again, with a, "Dipper. Come in, Dipper." More static. And then she took a deep breath and said to the static-y line, "Look, I know you're out on some super-secret mission with Grunkle Ford right now, but you _really_ need to let us know where you are now, okay? It's _super_-important."

But all Mabel got was more static and noise.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

\---

Stan _really_ wasn't liking this.

Mabel should've been able to raise her brother on that walkie-talkie of hers by now. The batteries should've been fine -- the kids were good about replacing those before going out every time. He'd been adamant about that in the most off-hand way he could manage -- by putting a box of old-looking batteries out in the middle of the clutter in the living room (ones that he'd made sure were all fully charged first) and dropping a few ‘hints’ in front of Mabel about how having a pair of those around to use at times might be useful, post-Ford being back and losing Soos temporarily on that roadtrip (eheh, oops), by bringing up how he’d talked to Soos on his own two-way radio solution that he’d set up with his employee for arrest-related emergencies a long time ago. Because sure, Mabel had a cellphone that she kept on her sometimes, but Stan had let her know in another off-hand comment that she'd probably get maybe no cell coverage in the woods even if she and her brother always stuck really close together, because of all of those trees there…

So when Mabel had sounded interested in wanting a pair of her own, Stan had just noted to her that there might be another pair of walkie-talkies like he had someplace around the Shack, and that had really been all that he’d needed to do. It hadn’t taken Mabel a second to toss him a ‘thanks, Grunkle Stan!’ and run off, to ‘find’ those old walkie-talkies in the back of a closet not half an hour later. And once she'd found them and tested them out, then frowned a little and cracked them open to figure out what was wrong, and realized the battery compartments were empty…

...well, then Stan had _made sure_ that when Mabel had asked him about it, to sound as _completely indifferent_ about the existence of said walkie-talkies and that old battery box and its contents as possible. ('Eh, sure. Use 'em for whatever you want.') The kids weren't slouches when it came to this stuff; acting like he was stingy on most stuff meant that when he 'didn't care' at them about them taking or using something that they'd asked him about? Meant that they always, _always_ took advantage of it when they could.

(If it had been Dipper, he’d have been more roundabout about it, though. Y’know, dropping a few hints with Soos, to have Soos be the one to bring it up around Dipper, instead of telling him directly. Because hey, why would the kid listen to what an old con-man had to tell him about stuff like that, when he had The Author of the Journals around to come up with who knew _what_ else for him -- and _only_ him, not thinking about Mabel at all there. And Stan didn’t completely trust that Ford would be able to come up with something that would have no chance of breaking on Dipper too easy, or be too dangerous or hard for him to use when he was panicking, or something like that. Not that Dipper wouldn’t say something to Ford about making one for Mabel, too; if something like that ever happened, he would.)

They were good kids. ...Better than he'd been, so long ago.

Point was, if Mabel wasn't raising Dipper on that thing, it wasn't gonna be because of the batteries not working. Dipper was either unconscious, the walkie-talkie was off somewhere completely smashed and broken, or… there was too much stuff between him and Mabel for the walkie-talkies to work. Lots of dirt and stuff. So Stan had been sneaking glances at one of his old fold-out maps of the woods, and walking Mabel up to top of each hill he’d ever sussed out, figuring that that’d give them the best shot of picking anything up.

...Except they were beginning to run outta hills, and at the rate they were going, they were going to have to give up for the night and leave to try again in the morning if they didn’t pick up on something soon. Last thing they needed to run into right now were some of those stupid feral gnomes...

Stan had his baseball bat out now, walking along with it in one hand, while he held the lantern up with the other. Mabel was trying the walkie-talkie every minute or two now, and she was getting tired despite however much Mabel Juice she’d had before leaving. Stan could relate; that was what bein’ terrified did to you, if you were runnin’ around scared and worried for too long.

“Mabel, sweetie, we can stay out for maybe another ten or twenty minutes, but then we’re gonna have to head back for the night,” Stan told her gruffly, hating to have to say it. He would’ve been fine continuing on if he’d been alone, but with Mabel in-tow, he was getting too tired to trust himself to be able to watch both her back and his. ...Maybe he could call Soos to come babysit her, make sure she didn’t try going out on her own again without him, and head out himself again later once she was settled in for the night, to keep looking. He didn’t like the idea of Dipper being out there, right smack dab in the middle of who-knew-what dangerous stuff that he’d dragged Dipper into--

\--Except Stan hadn’t stopped him, either of them, when he’d seen them leave together that morning. Because after what had happened out in those woods... maybe he’d been being selfish, thinking that maybe Dipper could keep _Ford_ out of trouble a little bit, if they were sticking mostly to stuff that was upstairs and out of the basement of the Shack. He hadn’t thought that Ford would really get either of the niblings involved in anything _dangerous_ \-- not after what Stan had told him that first night he’d been back. Ford knew that the reason he hadn’t wanted him around the kids was because he didn’t want them getting mixed up in any dangerous stuff, but after seeing how Ford had tried to keep Dipper safe when that brain-eating wizard had tried to mess with them both… He’d realized that Ford wasn’t just in it for himself; he cared enough about the niblings to want them to stay safe, too. If anything happened, he’d try to protect them, too.

If he’d really thought Ford was going to get Dipper mixed up in anything really dangerous, he would’ve stopped them both when he saw them leaving that morning. But he hadn’t. And now…

“Grunkle Stan, _no!_” Mabel protested, turning around and looking scared at him all of a sudden. “We can’t stop now! Dipper could be out there, all alone--”

“Ford wouldn’t leave him alone,” Stan told her roughly. Hell, he _better_ not have. Even his brother wasn’t _that_ dumb. “Whatever’s goin’ on, they’re probably _both_ stuck in it.” Stan stopped in place and let out a sigh. “...Mabel,” he tried, levelling with her as he held the lantern up to try and let her get a good look at him, and how serious and apologetic he was being just then. “It’s getting really late. We stay out here too much longer, we’re gonna end up runnin’ into somethin’ that ain’t so... friendly to run into,” he told her.

“Like the Gremloblin?” Mabel said, eyes widening a bit on him.

“Yeah, like that,” Stan said, racking his brain for what she was talking about. Was that one of those big monster-things out of Ford’s third journal? He couldn’t keep half the monsters out there straight, really. Not when Ford picked such dumb names for them, geez. “We stumble over one a’ those in the dark, we won’t be in any shape to be helpin’ out your brother, believe me,” he told her.

“But--” she began, looking distraught… and about to run off on him. He’d seen that kind of growing stubborn before in his twin’s face. ...And, heck, if Ford had gotten lost when _he_ was their age, he wouldn’t have taken it well either, anybody telling him to stop looking for him; he knew Ford would’ve felt the same way about it too, way back when.

“C’mere,” Stan said, stowing the bat behind his back again and lowering the lantern, and gesturing for her to come forward. She hesitated, then did what he wanted her to do, and he picked her up, then turned away and walked the short distance over to the nearest tree, to set her down underneath it (while trying to stifle the groan), and then sat himself down himself with a sigh. (And he felt a little better with that big hunk of wood tree at his back, already.)

“Look,” he told her, wrapping one arm around her as he pulled her up against his side, while setting the lantern down in front of him. (He took a moment to surreptitiously pull the bat out from behind his back again, to set it down beside him _very_ close by -- just in case -- as he distracted her by using his other hand to pull out…)

“A map!” Mabel exclaimed, taking it from him and unfolding it completely, to spread it out across both their knees. “You have a map of the--”

“--entire forest, yeah, pumpkin, I do,” he admitted to her.

“It’s got the gnome town on it!” Mabel exclaimed, brightening up a bit. “And the gnome tavern! And the height-altering crystals! --Grunkle Stan!” Mabel looked up at him wide-eyed. “Where did you get this?”

“Ford’s study,” he told her, settling in with her a bit.

“Wow,” Mabel said, looking back down at it. “I didn’t know he had one of these. Dipper is going to _freak out_ when he sees this! He--” And then Mabel quieted down.

Stan held back a sigh. Right; Mabel must think that he’d grabbed it from downstairs that night when he’d told her he was going to check down in the basement _one more time_, just to be _sure_ they weren’t hiding down there together behind some equipment or something. ...Well, technically, he _had_ grabbed it from downstairs, yeah. It had just been a heck of a long time ago, and hadn’t had nearly as much stuff on it when he had. ...None of the stuff, really. There had been none of this stuff on it when he’d first grabbed it. It had been a huge blank sheet of paper, and he’d ended up grabbing it and taking it to the library with him with a idea, after those first few days that he’d been stuck in the house with that snowstorm going on. At the time, he’d been stupid about it, thinking that maybe, just maybe, if he pulled enough levers and hit enough switches and buttons, he could get Ford’s portal thing working again without really needing to know what it was or anything about how it worked. He’d proven himself wrong pretty quickly there, all things considered.

Once he’d realized that, and gotten his very first haul out of showing off some of Ford’s science junk to folks for grocery money… he’d realized that this was gonna take a lot longer than he’d been hoping, and he was almost definitely gonna need those other journals of Ford’s to really figure this whole thing out. So one of the first things he’d done was scour that first journal of Ford’s for any info on where the others of them were… and gotten nothing. All he had was what Ford had told him, and an idea that Ford couldn’t have taken them too far to hide them, or he wouldn’t have needed to call Stan into town in the first place. So Stan had gone to the library and he’d copied out a map of the area onto it so he’d have something to work from, in looking for those other journals he’d talked about when he’d first shown him that portal thing, and all that. He’d needed to; Ford’s first journal only had little bits and pieces of maps of the area on some of the pages in there, on only _some_ of the pages, and… heck, he’d needed _something_ to work from, trying to find those other journals of his. (Because as far as he could tell from searching every last corner of the Shack at one point or another, Ford hadn’t actually made a full map of his own of the forest, for whatever reason. ...Or he had, and he’d gotten rid of it, too. But with the way Ford had acted about him trying to burn ‘his research’, Stan didn’t think that one was all that likely.)

Mabel probably couldn’t see it in the light of this lantern, but while the map was in pen, all the old ‘x’ marks he’d made on it over the years were in mostly-erased pencil. He had a second copy of the map back at the Shack; after awhile, he’d just started to copy out parts of it onto smaller pages for digging nights, once he’d realized what his limit was, for number of hours at night and number of holes...

“You’ll get to show him this thing later,” Stan told Mabel, “Watch him geek out on ya and everything, yeah?” He waited for her smile, then, “Look,” he told her next, getting down to brass tacks. “We’re here.” He pointed to where they were on the map, long-used to navigating the woods at night, and with a lot less light to help him, to boot -- the three-quarters moon was helping them out a bit tonight. “This is where we’ve been so far,” he told her, as he dragged his finger across the map, from where they were right then all the way back to the Shack.

“We’ve been going across all these bumpy-looking areas,” Mabel noted, with a slight frown. “...These are the hills we’ve been walking up and down?” she asked him next, looking up at him.

“Yeah,” Stan told her, “These are the hills we’ve been climbin’.” He sighed and scratched at his cheek. “I figure the reason you aren’t raisin’ your brother here is because there’s too much dirt or somethin’ in the way,” he told her. “We get on top of these hills, we should be able to raise ‘em if they’re anywhere except--”

“--on the other sides of those other hills!” Mabel said, snuggling up against his side a little bit.

“Yeah,” Stan said. That, and with the line of sight they were getting to the rest of the forest on top of each of these hills… there were a lot of places that Dipper _couldn’t_ be, if his walkie-talkie wasn’t broken and he had it on him to get at it. He shifted in place a little bit. “I figure we can maybe only hit one more of these tonight, sweetie,” he said, “Before it gets too late and too dangerous out.” He pulled in a breath next and asked the big one, “You got any idea what that ‘super-secret mission’ of your brother’s was supposed to be about?” She couldn’t know _where_ it was, or she would’ve said something about it before now. But maybe if she knew _something_ about it...

“No,” Mabel sighed out. “Just that it was some kind of ‘save the world’ thing. ‘Fate of the universe’, ‘only you can help me’, ‘hurry _up_ Dipper’, blah blah blah,” and now Mabel was frowning down at the map.

Stan let out a grumpy, frustrated sigh. “_Great._” He told his dumb genius brother not to go getting the kids mixed up in anything dangerous, and what did he do? Typical Ford. Just...

“You know anything about _what_ Ford thinks he’s tryin’ to save the world from?” Stan asked her next.

“Um, heh,” Mabel said next, looking a little… embarrassed? “Guess you missed that family meeting. Hey-yo…”

Stan eyed her critically, and her already pretty flat attempt at humor had what little smile she had on her face dropping off it pretty quickly after.

“You wanna fill me in on what I missed _now_?” Stan asked her next, and… he’d never seen Mabel look that uneasy before.

“It’d… take awhile to explain,” she told him. “But, um, short version is? Grunkle Ford’s trying to protect us from a dumb triangle guy, and--”

Stan’s eyes narrowed quickly. “Has this guy been hanging around the _Shack?_” The _hell?!_ If somebody was stalking Ford, and Dipper got hurt because of it--

“No!” Mabel told him. “I mean, not anymore. Grunkle Ford took care of that a couple weeks ago. But--“

“--this guy better not have followed them out into the woods,” Stan said tersely, but he stopped when Mabel put a hand on his arm.

“No, Grunkle Stan,” she said. “Bill’s a demon who gets into people’s heads. --_Literally_,” she told him. “He, uh, he got into yours once when Gideon was trying to get the combination for your safe?” _Huh?_ “While you were asleep.” _What?_ “You can’t really punch him when you’re not asleep and he’s not in your dreams.” The heck?

...Ugh. This was giving him a headache, trying to wrap his brain around it. The heck had Ford been messing with and makin’ enemies out of, anyway?

“So, what, those two are off fighting this Bill guy in their dreams for the ‘fate of the universe’ or somethin’?” The heck? Stan was gonna have a thing or two to say to his brother about this...

Mabel shook her head at him. “No. Grunkle Ford made the Shack safe to sleep in, so Bill can’t get into our dreams in it anymore. He and Dipper wouldn’t just fall asleep outside someplace!”

Stan frowned at this. _That_ made it sound like…

“So if they fall asleep someplace that isn’t the Shack, this Bill character can get at them. In their dreams. While they’re asleep.” Mabel nodded at him, and that had Stan frowning, because what the heck would happen at the end of the summer when Mabel and Dipper left for home, then? Ford hadn’t sounded like he’d been planning on leaving Gravity Falls after the summer was over -- so who was gonna make the niblings’ house in Piedmont safe to sleep in, then?

...Yeah, okay. That was a problem for another night when he knew where Dipper _was_ and was not sleeping.

“Any idea what they were actually trying to do out in the woods here that would be all fate of the universe-y?” Stan asked her next, but Mabel just shook her head. Great. He had maybe _one_ idea there that might _maybe_ be a thing, then, but...

Stan opened his mouth to ask her another question, but then realized with a start that, at some point, the forest had suddenly gone deathly silent.

He glanced up in alarm, shoved the map at Mabel, and quickly slapped the back shutters shut on the lantern as he grabbed up his bat in his other hand. It left the light only shining outwards, not in his eyes anymore (and no longer illuminating the map).

“Grunkle Stan? What’s wr…?” Mabel began, but she stopped as he held an arm out in front of her and across her, defensively.

“Use your grappling hook and get up into the tree,” Stan told Mabel under his breath in more of a whisper, as she pulled the map towards her, and he scanned the area, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness and gloom surrounding them. He knew she had it on her; she _always_ had it on her.

“But…” she began, and then--

...the sound of a hooting owl broke the dead silence of the woods.

And the normal nighttime noises of the bugs and the rustling of small nocturnal forest creatures through the brush and such slowly started filtering in again around them.

Stan frowned.

...They’d stayed in one place too long.

“Get up,” Stan told Mabel, under his breath still and just as quietly as he had before, even as the adrenaline hummed through his veins. He was getting too old for this junk. One thing was clear, though: they’d stayed in one place for too long, and they needed to get moving again, right now. _Something_ was out on the prowl tonight in this area, and he _didn’t_ want to know what that _something_ really was. “There’s one more hill we can check tonight,” Stan told his grand-niece, as he helped her to her feet, before picking up the lantern again. “But then we’re gonna have to go back.”

Mabel looked around a little, frowning, but she didn’t protest. (Not right then, anyway.) She just folded up the map, tucked it away, and looked up at him with far too much trust and an edge of worry in her eyes.

“Stay in front of me,” he told her. “Keep your grappling hook ready,” he told her next as he nudged her forward, and they started moving off. “If I tell you to run, then you run,” he told her next, still under his breath, “And if I tell you to climb, then you get up into a tree with that grappling hook of yours -- no waiting this time. _**Understand?**_”

He saw Mabel nod at him in front of him.

Stan let out a breath. He swore, these kids were gonna be the death of him someday -- and he was going to out-and-out _murder_ his brother whenever he caught up to him next. Pulling the kids into some kind of ‘save the world’ nonsense. That sorta stuff was supposed to be for adults, not kids. And his brother hadn’t even _thought_ to tell him about any of it. _Typical._

\---


	3. Chapter 3

\---

Mabel felt a little nervous, as she walked a few steps ahead of her grunkle through the woods, staying in the light of the lantern he was holding out in front of them. It wasn’t too hard to tell where he wanted her to go -- Grunkle Stan just pointed the lantern in a direction and she walked that way, and then he walked that way, too, behind her. They weren’t talking anymore, though. Mabel was just listening to the static on the walkie-talkie now, and Grunkle Stan seemed almost _nervous_, as they kept on walking through the really dark forest and trees.

Not _nervous_-nervous, not like Dipper got. This was more of a nervous like… like Grunkle Stan thought he needed to swing his bat, but didn’t know _which_ way he was gonna have to swing it? And maybe like he was worried that when he swung it, he might not be fast enough to hit something? Whatever it was he was swinging at?

It worried Mabel a bit, because she’d never seen Grunkle Stan that uncertain about anything before. Even with the zombies, he hadn’t been that kind of worried. ...The zombies _had_ been kind of on the slow-ish side, though.

After awhile, Mabel found herself walking up the side of a really, _really_ steep hill -- okay, make that almost _climbing_ up the side of it, she actually had to shove her walkie-talkie into a side pouch to concentrate on the climbing -- and when they got up to the top of it...

...they weren’t actually at the top of it, yet. It still sloped up a bit more, a little bit more gently like a normal rolling hill? But they were in the middle of a huge clearing, now.

“Get out your walkie-talkie, sweetie, see if you can raise your brother on that thing one more time,” Grunkle Stan told her, and he was frowning slightly as he looked around, swinging the lantern around to check the treeline behind them, baseball bat still held at the ready.

...Well, now was as good a time as any, right? They weren’t at the top of the hill yet, but...

“Mabel to Dipper; come in, Dipper. Over.” Mabel winced as she got just more static on her walkie-talkie. “Dipper? Do you read me? Over.” Still nothing but static. “Dipper-- AH!” She felt herself pulled back by her backpack abruptly. “Grunkle St--?” she began, but then stopped at the look on his face, which was caught somewhere between disbelief and--

He actually looked kinda pale, and Mabel glanced in front of her, where Grunkle Stan was leaning forward and shining his lantern, and...

Oh. Wow. That was one _deep_ hole.

“That ain’t right,” she heard Grunkle Stan say in an odd tone of voice, and she was about to ask him what was wrong, when he told her, “I’ll hold onto your backpack, okay; you try callin’ down into there with that.”

Mabel blinked at him, but did as he said, holding out the walkie-talkie in front of her and… “Dipper? Come in, Dipper. Over.”

They waited.

...Still nothing but static.

“Try again,” Grunkle Stan told her, and she did, but after another round of static, and Grunkle Stan pulling her away from the hole, but still looking around the area like he was… expecting something somehow? Mabel said to him, “Grunkle Stan, it’s just a big old hole…. right?”

But when Grunkle Stan turned in place, peering out at the night, and said, “Pumpkin, I put a big old grate over that hole, so I couldn’t fall down into it. And now it’s...”

“--over there?” Mabel said, peering around and then pointing, and Grunkle Stan swiveled and held out the lantern and peered into the darkness…

...and let out a “Heh,” as he only took a moment to pick up his bat again, before walking away from the hole. Together, they approached the thing that had sort of looked a little like a twisted-up fallen-over tree at a distance to Mabel, until she’d known what Grunkle Stan was looking for.

“Got better eyes than I do, kiddo,” Grunkle Stan told her next, ruffling a hand on top of her head, as they came up beside it.

“Alpha twin who doesn’t need glasses! Boom!” she enthused out, to a soft chuckle from her Grunkle. The levity drained away as she approached the, wow, pretty twisted up piece of _huge_ metal grating that was just sitting there out in the middle of the field just a _little_ closer, and...

Mabel blinked, because when she tried poking it, it didn’t budge -- not even a little.

“Grunkle Stan?” she asked, as her grunkle noticed this, too, and tried shoving a shoulder into it -- and the thing didn’t move on him either. “How’d it get like this?” she asked him, as he straightened back up, because this thing was actually pretty thick; she was pretty sure she could’ve bounced up and down on it before it had gotten all crumpled-up, and it would’ve been fine. Heck, _Grunkle Stan_ probably could’ve jumped up and down on it and been fine.

“Stupid thing’s embedded in the dirt…” Grunkle Stan muttered out, as he walked around it, peering at the base of it, and then up at the broken, _torn_ edges of it reaching up towards the sky. “Something didn’t just shove this thing outta there; this thing got _hit_ from below, _hard_,” Grunkle Stan told her, but he sure didn’t sound at all happy about that.

“From below?” Mabel asked him. “What’s down that hole?”

“Not sure,” he told her, as he glanced back over at where the hole was, then took a knee and pulled his duffel bag off of his back to set it down with a thump beside him. “Too much dirt down there to tell, before. Wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.”

Mabel looked down at what he was doing -- pulling a really long piece of rope out of his duffel bag and tying it to the crumpled-up old metal grate thing there -- and she looked back at the hole.

And then she got it.

“You think Dipper’s down there,” Mabel said in hushed tones, not sure what to feel, as she turned around to look back over at her grunkle.

“That hole’s pretty deep,” he told her, as he shouldered his duffel bag again, and started playing out the line, as he walked back towards the hole. “Wouldn’t be able to pick anything up from him through all that metal.”

“Metal?” Mabel asked him, confused. “Don’t you mean dirt?”

“No, I mean metal, Grunkle Stan told her. “And dirt,” he added. “There’s dirt down in the bottom of it as far down as I could dig way back when, but _that_ hole’s got metal sides. And while Mabel was contemplating _that_ one (because how could Grunkle Stan dig out a really deep hole with metal sides?), Grunkle Stan dropped the rest of the free end of the rope down into the dark hole (shaft?) and said, “There’s maybe a foot or two of dirt on top of a bunch of big metal plates all around here. I’m not so sure what’s under this hill,” he told her, as he lowered his lantern, then managed to tie it to his waist at his belt somehow, “But I really didn’t want to try and find that one out way back when. ...Kinda still don’t,” he admitted with a frown, “But I guess I’m gonna figure it out now,” he told her, as he frowned a really grunkle-y frown down at that big old black hole.

“Wait for me!” Mabel told him next, as it looked like he was about to grab up the rope again and start walking himself over the side of it. She pulled out her grappling hook and aiming it at the huge crumpled-up grate--

\--but Grunkle Stan put a hand over the end of it, and told her, “I need you up here, keeping watch. If something goes wrong,” he told her, “You’ve got that cellphone of yours. The top of this hill’s high enough, and clear enough, that you should get a signal.” Mabel frowned but pulled out her phone and she realized -- he was right.

“But--” Mabel began, lowering her phone. “What if Dipper’s down there, and he _needs_ me!”

“Sweetie, if that rope gives out and you’re down there with me, there ain’t no way we’re getting out.” Mabel frowned at him, about to protest. “Kid, nobody knows that we’re out here, and that cellphone of yours ain’t gonna do squat if you’re down there in that hole with me, trust me on this one. That grappling hook of yours doesn’t have enough rope on it to follow me down there anyway.”

And while Mabel was thinking about how he was so sure about _that_ one, Grunkle Stan frowned as he looked around, out and across the whole hill.

“...I don’t want to be left all alone by myself up here,” Mabel told him. She’d had _way_ too much of being all alone today to last her a lifetime! And now Grunkle Stan was going to leave her behind now, too? “I don’t want you to be all alone down there, either!” Mabel told him next, because… wasn’t Grunkle Stan still afraid of heights? The water tower thing had only seemed to work for a little while after...

“Look, you hear everything get too quiet again like before, you leave your backpack up here and you come right down that rope real quick,” Grunkle Stan told her next. “Shoot that grappling hook of yours at anything scary that moves, then let go of it, if you have to do that before getting down that rope to me, first. But most of the dangerous stuff in these woods don’t like clearings all that much, and I shouldn’t be that long down there and everything. You’ll be fine,” he told her, bumping her chin with a loose fist. “I’ll be right back, okay? With your brother and everything,” he told her.

“You--” _promise?_ Mabel almost asked him. But instead she said, as she realized… “You’re _sure_ that Dipper’s down there?”

“Yeah,” Grunkle Stan told her. “I’m pretty sure he’s down there with Ford.” He pulled an old-man grumpy face as he looked over the edge a little bit, then leaned back a bit again. “This whole stupid thing’s got my brother’s name all over it,” he told her gruffly, and somehow… that sort of made her feel better.

Mabel thought about this.

“And if they’re not down there, then there’s probably clues on where they are now,” she said firmly, and for some reason, that had Grunkle Stan letting out a little laugh.

“Yeah,” her favorite grunkle told her, ruffling her hair a bit again before starting over the side, holding the rope. “Don’t know about Dipper, but I’m pretty sure my brother’s idea of a big honking clue is a bunch of explosions.”

And while that left Mabel blinking and quietly giggling, Grunkle Stan walked himself over the side of the hole, rope pretty firmly in-hand.

\---


	4. Chapter 4

\---

Stan hadn’t really wanted to come out here. It was one of the few areas of the forest that he just had _never_ wanted to mess with, if he didn’t have to. --And he hadn’t ever had to, not really. Anything that looked ‘interesting’ enough to have gotten Ford’s attention with whatever this big buried thing was? Had obviously been covered over with enough packed dirt for long enough that Stan had been pretty sure that it hadn’t been something that Ford had gone messing with _recently_...

...except for the hole.

_That_ had been a headache and a half. He’d tried using that grappling hook to get down there the first time, a heck of a long time ago -- long before that grappling hook gun had ended up in a box in the Shack’s gift shop -- and that had involved driving the Stanleymobile out here to use as a convenient thing to tie the end of a grappling hook to, to begin with.

He’d ended up having to go to the store for more rope before he was done, _twice_, before he'd gotten something long enough that he was able to get himself down to the bottom of it. And then he’d dug down around nine feet into the dirt at the bottom of that _‘hole’_ after _that_ before finally giving up on whether this was maybe supposed to be one of those hiding spots or not -- because he'd been pretty sure that Ford _hadn’t_ buried any of his journals down at the bottom of this big old conspicuous metal shaft of a hole. It was way too suspicious-looking, to begin with.

Dragging that big old grate up to the base of the hill by the tow-hook of the Stanleymobile had been another headache-and-a-half, way back when. Digging into the dirt down a good four feet all around the hole had been another. Getting it in place hadn’t been too hard, it had just taken a little while setting up all those pulleys and stuff. Packing the dirt back down on top of it hadn’t been too bad, either -- just tiring.

Finding the stupid grate sticking outta the ground a good twenty feet away from the hole, beaten up, broken, twisted, and standing near-upright half on one end? Buried into the dirt hard enough that the stupid thing wouldn’t budge, even when he put his whole weight into it? ...Yeah, this had Ford’s name written all over it. Whatever had ripped this thing outta the ground from below had to have launched it up into the sky like a damn rocket -- or a huge coin, flipping end-over-end until it had come falling back down...

Ford was all into tech and science-y things and metal, and the sides of this hole had the same look as some of that crazy metal that he’d built that ‘trans-universal gateway’ of his out of, among some of the other stuff he’d had down there in that basement lab. And Stan figured, if Ford had been complaining about something world-ending-y, then it had to do with that portal of his. And if it wasn’t something down in the basement, then there was only one other place Stan had ever seen anything like that same stuff as there, and it was here. Right here. Lining the side of this hole he was slowly making his way down, down on this rope of his right here.

...And this night, this thing seemed even darker than it had the last time that he’d tried to come down here. Before he’d put that huge grate over it, worried that if he _didn’t_ do that, that some of those cows from that stupid farm nearby might end up that far out someday, and fall down into it, and then the whole thing would be ‘discovered’ and a whole bunch of people would come in, wanting to look at it...

And whether that was a bunch of scientist-guys and nerds or a bunch of government officials looking all over the place, Stan hadn’t liked his chances at keeping the stuff he was doing down in Ford’s basement under wraps for much longer, once people started looking around and looking into things, both in the forest and in the rest of the town. Because it wasn’t like those ‘mysterious science guy who lives in the woods’ stories had gone away by that point… (or ever really completely had these days still, if anybody knew the right questions to ask, to get all those old tongues wagging about it, all over again. That was why he’d been so adamant about Dipper not talking with those government agent-goons about any of the weird stuff in town; guys like that dug up dirt on people on the daily. And they had done it, too. Kind of. Eventually. Even though he’d still been trying to be pretty careful, thinking that the heat was _probably_ off of him now.)

(Well. Now it _really_ was, after that whole ‘memory gun’ thing that Ford had pulled, but still.)

So, yeah. He’d never wanted to mess with this thing. Place gave him the creeps. And he’d been out on his own, workin’ on stuff with no backup, to boot. Something happened to him down here and it wasn’t just _him_ stuck with no help coming -- back then, if _he’d_ gotten himself into any trouble that he couldn’t get himself out of, it would’ve meant _Ford_ being lost forever wherever he was on the other side of that blue portal that he was still fighting to figure out how to turn on still there, too.

This time, he had Mabel above with her cellphone, but it was the middle of the night, the monsters were all out and about in the woods, and Stan wasn’t going to be leaving her alone up there for long.

He’d almost left his bat up there with her, but she was better with that grappling hook of hers than a bat. He didn’t want to risk her fumbling them either, spending seconds she didn’t have trying to figure out which thing to use and then getting herself hurt, or worse. So… it was all he could do for her; tell her to keep her grappling hook out, and to come down the rope with him if she needed to.

...And he’d have to pray that whatever might be up there wasn’t smart enough to go off cutting the rope on them.

Eh. Most stuff out at night in those woods wasn’t, though. Daytime was when you had to deal with the ones you could talk at the most.

Stan grimaced as a boot slipped against the side slightly, and he forced himself _not to flail out_ like a dummy. Best stupidest way to get yourself killed, doing something like that.

He let out a breath, and pulled out his flashlight to light up the slick patch he’d just moved across. ...Moss. Yeah, okay.

He focused more on the climbing-down than the thinking about stuff for the rest of his descent, as he (not too slowly, and only kind of) carefully made his way down, and down, and down the rest of the rope.

And landed, boots-to-dirt, down against the bottom of the base of the hole.

Except his boots didn’t _hit_ dirt, they hit _metal_.

Stan muttered some not-quite-so-choice words at his brother, as he slowly let go of the rope, testing his footing (and the ability of this surface to handle his weight). And, once he’d done that…

...he knocked the heel of his boot against the metal iris-looking thing underneath him, and let out a tired sigh.

And he let out a frustrated grunt next, once he’d tied a few loops near the end of the rope to him around his waist, dropped his duffel bag at the edge of the hole, walked his way to the center of the mechanical iris opening (where he _thought_ it should open, anyway), and wedged his crowbar from his duffel bag into the center of the hole.

Or, well, _tried_ to, anyway.

\---


End file.
